skip to main |
skip to sidebar
The Academy did us amateur film historians a real disservice by using their wacky split-year eligibility scheme (August 1 through July 31 of the following year) for the first few years of the Oscars. Not only was it confusing and completely unnecessary, it also disguised just how much the quality of American movies suffered as Hollywood made the transition from the silent era to sound.
As you can see from yesterday's post, the tail-end of 1928 was chockful of some of the best silent movies in history. (Peter Bogdanovich says 1928 was the best year for movies ever. Who am I to disagree?) And this year's winner, All Quiet On The Western Front from 1930, is one of the best movies of the entire era.
But in between? Well ...
Let's put it this way. My list of the five best movies of 1929 would probably include Un Chien Andalou, Man With A Movie Camera, Pandora's Box, Diary of a Lost Girl and maybe The Iron Mask, the first four being foreign films and the fifth being Douglas Fairbanks's last silent movie. The best talkie of the year? Not sure. The Cocoanuts? Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail? The Skeleton Dance from Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks?
Fortunately, things got better.
PICTURE
winner: All Quiet On The Western Front (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)
nominees: Anna Christie (prod. Clarence Brown); The Big House (prod. Irving Thalberg); Bulldog Drummond (prod. Samuel Goldwyn); City Girl (prod. William Fox)
Must-See Drama: All Quiet On The Western Front; Anna Christie; The Big House; Bulldog Drummond; City Girl; Our Modern Maidens; Raffles; The Virginian
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Cocoanuts (prod. Monta Bella)
nominees: Applause (prod. Monta Bell); Hallelujah! (prod. King Vidor) The Love Parade (prod. Ernst Lubitsch); The Skeleton Dance (prod. Walt Disney)
Must-See Comedy/Musical: The Cocoanuts; Hallelujah!; The Love Parade
PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: The Blue Angel (prod. Erich Pommer)
nominees: The Blood Of A Poet (prod. Le Vicomte de Noailles); Diary Of A Lost Girl (prod. Georg Wilhelm Pabst); Earth (prod. VUFKU); Pandora's Box (prod. Heinz Landsmann); Under the Roofs Of Paris (prod. Films Sonores Tobis)
Must-See Foreign Language Pictures: The Blood Of A Poet; The Blue Angel; Diary Of A Lost Girl; Earth; Menschen am Sonntag; Pandora's Box; Under The Roofs Of Paris
ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Ronald Colman (Bulldog Drummond)
nominees: George Arliss (Disraeli); Lew Ayres (All Quiet On The Western Front); Emil Jannings (The Blue Angel)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade)
nominees: The Marx Brothers (The Cocoanuts); Albert Préjean (Under The Roofs Of Paris)
ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Louise Brooks (Pandora's Box and Diary Of A Lost Girl)
nominees: Marlene Dietrich (The Blue Angel); Greta Garbo (Anna Christie)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Nina Mae McKinney (Hallelujah!)
nominees: Jeanette MacDonald (The Love Parade); Helen Morgan (Applause)
DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front)
nominees: Aleksandr Dovzhenko (Earth); F.W. Murnau (City Girl); G.W. Pabst (Pandora's Box and Diary Of A Lost Girl); Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: King Vidor (Hallelujah!)
nominees: René Clair (Under The Roofs Of Paris); Ernst Lubitsch (The Love Parade); Rouben Mamoulian (Applause)
SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Wallace Beery (The Big House)
nominees: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Our Modern Maidens); Lupino Lane (The Love Parade); Francis Lederer (Pandora's Box); Louis Wolheim (All Quiet On The Western Front)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Marie Dressler (Anna Christie)
nominees: Leila Hyams (The Big House); Seena Owen (Queen Kelly); Anita Page (Our Modern Maidens); Lilyan Tashman (Bulldog Drummond)
SCREENPLAY
winner: George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews; from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet On The Western Front)
nominees: Elliott Lester; adaptation and scenario by Marion Orth and Gerthold Viertel; titles by H.H. Caldwell and Katherine Hilliker (City Girl); Frances Marion; additional dialogue by Joseph Farnham and Martin Flavin (The Big House)
SPECIAL AWARDS
"Swanee Shuffle" (Hallelujah!) (Best Song); Arthur Edeson (All Quiet On The Western Front) (Cinematography); Rouben Mamoulian (Applause) and C. Roy Hunter and Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound)
Adapted from three previous posts on the occasion of Miriam Hopkins's 109th birthday.
Largely forgotten now, Miriam Hopkins was one of the sauciest actresses of the pre-Code age, excelling in light comedies and lurid melodramas alike and nabbing an Oscar nomination along the way. Her early sound movies are some of the best of the era, yet often proved too scandalous to be re-issued once censors began taking scissors to Hollywood's past. Coupled with the years lost while she languished on the McCarthy-era blacklist, and even film fanatics can admit to having rarely seen her work.
Hopkins was born in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up in a small town on the Alabama border, but she was acting on the Broadway stage by the age of eighteen with her turn in the stage adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy in 1926 really making audiences sit up and take notice. She made her feature-film debut in the 1930 comedy Fast and Loose, and within a year turned in two of her best film performances, in Ernst Lubitsch's musical comedy The Smiling Lieutenant and Rouben Mamoulian's adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson horror classic, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In the first of these, Maurice Chevalier plays a randy lieutenant in the Austrian army who beds down with an equally randy violinist played by Claudette Colbert. (Her band's name? "The Viennese Swallows." Ahem.) The two make beautiful music together, literally and figuratively, until by accident, Chevalier finds himself mistakenly flirting with a visiting princess—the prim, virginal Hopkins—instead of Colbert, threatening an international incident.
"When you winked at my daughter," asks the king, "were your intentions honorable?"
"They were," says the lieutenant.
"Well, then naturally you'll marry her."
"My intentions were dishonorable!" the lieutenant says quickly.
"Then you'll have to marry her!"
Variety in a contemporary review praised Hopkins as the more experienced Colbert's equal, while eighty years later Dan Callahan noted, "Hopkins gives an expertly timed comic performance as plain-Jane royalty with Princess Leia buns on her ears who makes a play for Chevalier."
A movie fan of today who knows Hopkins's pre-Code work waits a little impatiently for the princess to bust out—knowing that when she does, it'll be worth it. But an audience of the time, not knowing Hopkins and what she was capable of, must have found her transformation from a prudish virgin to a cigarette-smoking, jazz-playing temptress just as shocking as Chevalier's lieutenant does.
It's a fun movie, loaded with double entendres and sexy situations, served up with the director's typically light, frothy style. I tell you, it's as bracing and intoxicating as cold champagne.
Hopkins followed up her success in The Smiling Lieutenant with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a movie that is the polar opposite of Lubitsch's comedy in every sense but quality. Both pictures received Oscar nominations, the former for best picture, the latter for actor, cinematography and screenplay.
The basic outline of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is familiar to us all—a scientist drinks a potion that turns him into a murdering beast with hairy hands and bad teeth. What tends to be forgotten is the why. Dr. Jekyll (here pronounced with a long "e," as in "gee whiz" rather than the familiar rhyme with "heckle") is striving for the perfectability of man, using science to distill out our bestial dark side, freeing the angels of our better nature to pursue more virtuous callings.
As in the other great horror picture of 1931, Frankenstein, the hubris of playing God leads to disaster.
Here, Hopkins plays Ivy Pearson, saloon singer, prostitute, and physical embodiment of Jekyll's base desires. The character is not in the novel, but is so perfect, you wonder why not. Taking full advantage of the pre-Code era's permissiveness, there's no question that Ivy is a prostitute and Hopkins doesn't try to soften her. Her Ivy is both lovely and—what is the word?—skanky at the same time. Her play for Jekyll is coarse and obvious, pulling up her skirts to show her legs, offering to be his slave. Even the priggish and pompous Jekyll feels the pull of the animal, and his shame is what drives him to try to cleanse himself of his base nature, resulting in the experiments that divide him.
That's the flaw, by the way, in the great Ingrid Bergman's performance as the same character in the 1941 remake. Her Ivy may live in low economic circumstances, but Bergman can't convince us that even on her worst day she was ever low or common, and thus Jekyll's revulsion at himself for wanting her makes no sense. But Hopkins? Well, she's very convincing as someone who'd inspire you to both sleep with her and then scrub yourself with lye soap and a wire brush afterwards, so different from the prim and proper princess of The Smiling Lieutenant you wonder that it's the same actress.
After the triumphs of 1931, Hopkins would top herself in two more Lubitsch comedies, Trouble in Paradise, in which she plays a con artist who teams up romantically and professionally with Herbert Marshall's master thief, and Design For Living, in which she scandalously resolves a love triangle with Fredric March and Gary Cooper by living with them both.
Trouble In Paradise is the story of a pair of sophisticated lovers, Gaston and Lily—Herbert Marshall and Hopkins—who romance and thieve their way across Europe, only to find their happiness threatened by a beautiful young widow who also happens to be the target of their latest scam.
The widow, who may well know she's being taken but is still eager for the ride, is played with sympathy and sex appeal by Kay Francis. Her polished, dark beauty contrasts nicely with Hopkins's earthy blonde charms and no doubt was a factor in her casting, as was her performance earlier that year in Jewel Robbery, in which she plays a willing victim to William Powell's elegant jewel thief. Although her career would later take a nose-dive after a bitter contract dispute at Warner Brothers, in 1932, she was at the peak of her popularity.
Just the plot I've described so far would provide the makings of a good comedy (or spun in a different direction, suspense thriller), but Lubitsch ups the ante by creating genuine chemistry between Gaston and the widow. Suddenly Trouble In Paradise is no longer a simple story about the theft of money, but the theft of Gaston's affections as well, which realistically can't end well for somebody. The inevitable heartbreak adds what Andrew Sarris called "a counterpoint of poignant sadness during a film's gayest moments," and is what, I think, lifts this sparkling comedy to the level of pure genius.
And that's without even addressing the numerous examples of Lubitsch's mastery of the technical end of his craft, which not only keeps the story moving but gives this confection its airy, art Deco style. "I think I have done nothing better or as good," he wrote of the film shortly before his death.
If Trouble In Paradise, with its depictions of thieves living happily ever after, had pushed the limits of pre-Code permissiveness, Hopkins's next picture, Design For Living, blew right past them.
The story of a woman who loves two men and makes them like it, Design For Living was based on Noel Coward's play about his own tangled relationship with Broadway's most famous acting couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, a triangle marked by professional and romantic jealousy, and self-destructive egotism.
As the movie opens, George (Gary Cooper) and Tom (Fredric March) are, respectively, an unsuccessful painter and an unsuccessful playwright—deservedly so judging by samples of their work. On a train to Paris, they meet Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), a commercial artist not the least bit embarrassed to earn a living painting advertisements of Napoleon in long underwear. She immediately recognizes the innate quality of both men and is determined to give George and Tom the pointers they need to become great artists while taking advantage of their soon-proven talents as lovers.
"A thing happened to me that usually happens to men," she says. "You see, a man can meet two, three or even four women and fall in love with all of them, and then, by a process of, uh, interesting elimination, he is able to decide which one he prefers. But a woman must decide purely on instinct, guesswork, if she wants to be considered nice. Oh, it's alright for her to try on a hundred hats before she picks one out, but—"
"That's very fine," says Tom, "but which chapeau do you want, madame?"
"Both."
Hopkins is perfect in the part, never veering too far into either smug certainty or guilt-wracked introspection. Lubitsch always wrote interesting female characters, and Gilda is one of his best. We think of feminism and the sexual revolution as primarily modern movements, a product of baby boomer discontent, but in fact, many movies in the pre-Code era were about strong women insisting on sexual and economic freedom. Barbara Stanwyck's Lily Powers, who sleeps her way to the top in 1933's Baby Face, was the most ruthless incarnation of the pre-Code feminist, but Lubitsch's Gilda may well have been the strongest.
Even more scandalous was 1933's The Story of Temple Drake. Based on William Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, the story of a flighty debutante's rape proved so shocking, it was banned in many states; Joseph Breen, who succeeded Will Hays as the head of the Production Code Office, later ordered it withdrawn from circulation and it remained unseen for decades. (Click here for Erik Beck's review.)
In 1935, Hopkins received her only Oscar nomination, for playing the conniving title character in Becky Sharp. Being a fellow Georgian, she was Margaret Mitchell's choice to play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind, but of course it was David O. Selznick's opinion that mattered.
Despite her success on screen, Hopkins was not well-liked by her Hollywood peers and she bounced around several studios in a short number of years. She had several well-publicized battles with Bette Davis on the sets of The Old Maid and Old Acquaintance, Davis later declaring, "Miriam Hopkins was a bitch!" (That Davis was having an affair with Hopkins's husband, Anatole Litvak, was no doubt a primary cause of the friction.)
Hopkins also disdained Hollywood society, preferring the company of writers such as William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser and William Saroyan. And even her sympathetic biographer Allan Ellenberger admits she had a volatile temper, waging on-set and behind-the-scenes battles with producers, directors and co-stars alike. She was also well-known for her eccentricities, for example, always consulting a psychic before accepting a new role, leading her to turn down the lead role in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, a part that won Claudette Colbert an Oscar, proving once and for all that the stars may control our fates but they don't know a damn thing about the movies.
Hopkins grew in- creasingly unpopular as the decade wore on—in 1940, the Harvard Lampoon dubbed her "the least desirable companion on a desert island"—and she retired in 1943. She didn't appear in another movie for six years, then made her comeback in The Heiress as Olivia de Havilland's aunt, a performance the Golden Globe awards recognized with a nomination for best supporting actress. In 1952, however, Hopkins was accused of being a Communist sympathizer and again she was out of the movies, this time for nine years.
In all, Hopkins made only thirty-three movies in her career, twenty-two of them by 1937.
Hopkins launched yet another comeback in the 1961 film, The Children's Hour, playing Shirley MacLaine's ditsy aunt to good reviews. (Coincidentally, Hopkins had played the MacLaine role in the first film version of Lillian Hellman's play in 1936 when it was produced under the title These Three.)
Hopkins also did a lot of television back when that meant appearances in live theater productions on shows such as Studio One and Lux Video Theater. She continued to work almost up to her death of a heart attack in 1972.
[To read Part One of this essay, click here. To read Part Two, click here. For Part Three, click here, and for Part Four, click here.]
V. Later Comedies and Lubitsch's Legacy
After Trouble In Paradise and Design For Living, "comedies without music" he called them, Lubitsch returned to the comfort of the operetta form he had perfected during the first days of sound. The story of a randy army officer ordered to woo a wealthy widow in order to save the country from bankruptcy, The Merry Widow—made while on loan to MGM—was the most polished and least suggestive of his five musicals. The Hays Office, by 1934 enforcing the Production Code, objected to several scenes and required extensive cutting before it would approve the film for release. (Fortunately, this footage was saved and has been restored.)
The Merry Widow received good reviews and won an Oscar for art direction, but with production costs of $1.6 million, it was the most expensive musical made to date and wound up losing money. It was also the last pairing of stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. The former found himself relegated to smaller and smaller parts and eventually returned to France; the latter paired up with Nelson Eddy and made commercially successful movies for the next decade, though in retrospect, none are as satisfying as those she made with Lubitsch.
After the commercial failure of The Merry Widow, Lubitsch did not direct another movie for three years. In the meantime, he took a job as production manager at Paramount, becoming the only director to ever run a major studio. I'd like to say it was an inspired choice, but in fact, Lubitsch had never been able to delegate authority easily and wound up interfering in many of the sixty productions a year he oversaw without really being able to contribute anything substantive, a result that pleased no one.
"I think I am possessed only of a fascination for the work I have chosen to do," he said later. "I am so engrossed by the production of a film that I literally think of nothing else. I have no hobby, no outside interests and want none."
He was unceremoniously dismissed as head of production in early 1936.
The time away from the director's chair, though, gave Lubitsch time to consider what kind of film he really wanted to make. Whipsawed on the one hand by the enforcement of the Production Code which had effectively forbidden the racier aspects of his style; and on the other by the aggressive style of the screwball comedy which made his gentle approach passe, Lubitsch temporarily lost confidence in his ability to make a successful picture.
He eventually figured it out, though not at Paramount, moving in 1939 to MGM, where he directed Greta Garbo in Ninotchka and James Stewart in The Shop Around The Corner, two of his best comedies, both preserved in the National Film Registry. In 1942, he made what is arguably his best movie, To Be Or Not To Be, an anti-war comedy starring Jack Benny and in the last role of her career, Carole Lombard. Blasted by critics at the time as being in bad taste, To Be Or Not To Be has become a particular favorite of critics over the intervening years and was included in the National Film Registry in 1996, one of five Lubitsch movies so honored.
"None of us thought we were making anything but entertainment for the moment," John Ford said later. "Only Ernst Lubitsch knew we were making art."
"Lubitsch had the greatest sense of humor of any individual I've ever met," said director Joseph M. Newman. "The actors all loved him. He had a very human quality about him. He was the type of man that became your friend after you met him once. A great man."
His most faithful disciple was fellow German refugee Billy Wilder, who wrote the screenplay to Ninotchka and later directed such classics as Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. Over his desk, Wilder posted a sign "How would Lubitsch do it?" But despite winning six Oscars during his career, Wilder ultimately concluded he had never measured up to his mentor. "His art is lost," he said. "That most elegant of screen magicians took his secret with him."
In 1943, Lubitsch received an Oscar nomination for Heaven Can Wait, the third nomination of his career, but once again, he did not win. In March 1947, as it became clear that Lubitsch's health was failing, the Academy presented him with a special award "[f]or his distinguished contributions to the art of the motion picture."
"With the passing years," wrote his biographer Scott Eyman, "it became increasingly clear that Ernst Lubitsch had accomplished something only vouchsafed the greatest artists: he had created a self-contained universe with a sensibility so singular, behavioral beauties so intense, that it forever altered the world view of those lucky enough to experience it. He believed in his dreams so strongly that millions of others came to believe in them as well, and the fact that the values and style of Lubitsch's work constituted the finest examples of the discarded heritage of elegant screen comedy made his everlasting, gentle brilliance even more poignant."
Ernst Lubitsch died of a heart attack in November,1947.
"No more Lubitsch," Billy Wilder lamented at the funeral.
"Worse than that," said William Wyler. "No more Lubitsch films."
[To read Part One of this essay, click here]
II. The Lubitsch Touch
Ernst Lubitsch arrived at Paramount Pictures in 1928. Like Warner Brothers, Paramount gave the director complete creative control, but unlike Warners, Paramount's executives didn't care if his movies made money or not. As long as he delivered his pictures on time, stayed within his allotted budget and pleased the critics, the prestige his presence lent the studio was compensation enough.
Such latitude was virtually unheard of, then or now, and no artist could have taken wiser advantage of the opportunity. Although already established as one of the world's best directors (his silent Carmen, for example, made the New York Times top ten list in 1921), Lubitsch blossomed once he arrived at Paramount in 1928.
So productive were Lubitsch's early years at Paramount that film historian James Harvey, in his study Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, called this period in movie history (1929-33) "The Lubitsch Era." He made full use of storytelling possibilities only just becoming apparent to a handful of directors as the new sound technology took hold in Hollywood, and in the process his films came to define the early romantic comedy.
It was during this period that Lubitsch turned an advertizing slogan—"The Lubitsch Touch"—into a very real style that filmmakers have been trying to define and emulate ever since.
The phrase "The Lubitsch Touch" has been associated with the man for so long, it's easy to forget it didn't just spontaneously attach itself to him sometime after birth. In fact, Hal Wallis, who years later would produce Casablanca, coined the phrase while working in the Warner brothers publicity department in the early '20s, but while Wallis may have only dreamed up the label to sell movie tickets, the tag wouldn't have stuck if it hadn't been founded on truth.
In the silent era, what the "touch" mostly meant was that Lubitsch wasn't making D.W. Griffith pictures. Griffith, as you no doubt know, practically invented what we think of a "movie," and from 1915 to 1921, he was the most famous director in America. But while his technical expertise was sophisticated, Griffith's storytelling was not, with earnest tales of virginal heroines and cartoon villains. In lesser hands, these unfortunately are the kind of stories many people think of when they think of silent movies—Snidely Whiplash tying Penelope to the railroad tracks—and even as practiced by the talented Griffith, audiences during the Roaring Twenties were ready for something new.
Thus arrived Lubitsch to serve champagne to an audience raised on buttermilk and although some, such as author-activist Jim Tully, writing for Vanity Fair in 1926, criticized him for making "frothy films for sophisticated chambermaids and cinema critics," French director Jean Renoir later opined that by leading American tastes—or at least the studios' tastes—away from Griffith, Lubitsch had invented the modern Hollywood.
Admittedly, I'm not sure Lubitsch in the silent era was doing anything all that different from Robert Weine, F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Abel Gance and other European directors, but American audiences weren't seeing those films (Nosferatu, for example, wasn't released in the United States until 1929, seven years after its German premiere). The nearest thing to European sensibilities showing in American theaters in the '20s were the films of Erich von Stroheim, whose Foolish Wives and Greed were tough sledding indeed.
Later, though, once technical breakthroughs allowed him to add dialogue, songs, sound effects and a film score, Lubitsch really was doing something different, and when we speak of the "touch," it's most often the Paramount films we're talking about. He already had a sense of how to tell a story through visuals—for example, the way he established Irene Rich's character in Lady Windermere's Fan with just a shot of a man reaching for a checkbook while she bites her thumb—but with the coming of sound, he was able to draw deeper characters, sharpen the wit, speed the pace, and in the process, pull back the curtain on human behavior, particularly human sexuality, in a way no other director had managed before.
"He could do more to show the grace and humor of sex in a nonlustful way," said Charlie Chaplin, speaking years later, "than any other director I've ever heard of." He was "a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it," critic Michael Wilmington wrote, "and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well."
After starting at Paramount with a historical drama, The Patriot, as much a part of his repertoire at the time as were his sophisticated comedies, Lubitsch commenced to make a series of "naughty operettas" (Harvey's phrase again), five of them altogether including The Merry Widow while on loan to MGM in 1934, and it was here that he mastered the art of talking about sex without talking about it at all.
"When I married her," says a cuckolded husband in One Hour With You, "she was a brunette. Now you can't believe a word she says."
"He created a style of sophisticated comedy peculiarly his own," said three-time Oscar winner William Wyler, "as well as a new style of musical, both unknown before his time. His films bore the recognizable and indelible stamp of the gay, clever, witty, mischievous master, whose delightful personality matched his work."
Although nearly everyone agrees Lubitsch brought something unique to the screen, no two people can quite agree on what we mean when we speak of "the Lubitsch touch." For Orson Welles, it was his originality. For director-historian Peter Bogdanovich, it's "sophistication." For film critic Roger Ebert, it's "dialogue [that] shimmers like poetry." For director Cameron Crowe, it's the "elegant joke" followed by "an even funnier joke, which becomes the ultimate joke you never expected."
And on and on.
For me, the touch has come to be characterized by three things: elision, invention and exuberance—and by the latter, I mean both the joy Lubitsch took in his craft and the sense of euphoria I experience when I watch the best of his movies.
More than any other director before or after, maybe more than any artist not named Ernest Hemingway telling very different kinds of stories, Lubitsch relied on elision—omitting words, scenes and action—to tell his jokes and his stories. "He realized," Billy Wilder said, "that if you say two and two, the audience does not have to be told it's four." Give the audience the conspiratorial pleasure of finding the joke themselves, "and you were rewarded by the laugh of the people who added it up."
Perhaps the most famous example of this was in The Merry Widow—a soldier (Maurice Chevalier) is guarding the door as the elderly, obese king leaves the queen's bedchamber. The camera follows the king down the hall until he realizes he's forgotten his saber. He returns, where we notice Chevalier is no longer standing. The camera lingers outside the door and a moment later, the king emerges with the forgotten sword. But as he attempts to buckle it on, the belt reaches only half way around his waist. And he and the audience arrive at a realization simultaneously.
Lubitsch was also obsessed with finding inventive ways to accomplish the otherwise mundane—"How can we do that without doing that?" was a question he was always asking of his writers. The answer was sometimes as simple as allowing the camera to linger on a vacated space when another director would have followed his actors; having a character enter the frame from an unexpected direction; editing out an actor's long walk from one part of a room to another; or, in a more complex sequence, the way he would establish a locale, eschewing the traditional long shot of a famous landmark, instead opening with something unexpected as in Trouble In Paradise where the focus is on an anonymous doorway, pulling back to reveal a garbage can, then following a trash collector until he reaches a gondola on the canals of what can only be Venice.
The effect is cheerfully buoyant rather than coldly academic, and serves to create a sense that the characters are floating on air, and that even when ostensibly set in a real place, the events were happening in what biographer Scott Eyman called "Lubitschland."
"I've been to Paris, France," Lubitsch said, "and I've been to Paris, Paramount. Paris Paramount is better."
Sometimes this genius for invention represented the difference between a classic and a misfire. In Conversations With Wilder, director Billy Wilder described to Cameron Crowe how for Ninotchka Lubitsch solved the problem of how to show the transformation of Greta Garbo's character from an ardent communist to an equally ardent capitalist without writing pages and pages of turgid, political dialogue.
"'The hat.' And we said, 'What hat?' He said, 'We build the hat into the beginning!' [Co-writer Charles] Brackett and I looked at each other—this is Lubitsch. The story of the hat has three acts. Ninotchka first sees it in a shop window as she enters the Ritz Hotel with her three Bolshevik accomplices. This absolutely crazy hat is the symbol of capitalism to her. She gives it a disgusted look and says, 'How can a civilization survive which allows women to wear this on their heads?' Then the second time she goes by the hat and makes a noise—tch-tch-tch. The third time, she is finally alone, she has gotten rid of her Bolshevik accomplices, opens a drawer and pulls it out. And now she wears it. Working with Lubitsch, ideas like that were in the air."
Working with Lubitsch, marveled Robert Stack after filming To Be Or Not To Be, was "like playing chess at ninety miles an hour."
"In an age in which machine-gun editing has replaced the cinematic equivalent of perfect pitch," Scott Eyman wrote in Laughter In Paradise, "Lubitsch might seem stodgy to a modern audience. If people lack the vocabulary to appreciate the beauty of this particular lost language, it's their loss. They'll never know the exhilaration of an impeccable artist."
Lubitsch loved to work and took great pains to create precisely the right shot; he loved life, too, both its happy and its sad sides. He was funny, charming, exuberant, and forgiving of every human foible but mediocrity and sanctimony, and these aspects of the man show up in every frame of film he shot. Sometimes he's suggestive—shots of sounding artillery spliced into scenes of a wedding night in The Love Parade—and sometimes he playfully chides you for having your mind in the gutter—for example, in The Smiling Lieutenant when Chevalier suggests waggishly to Claudette Colbert that they could make beautiful music together, and then a cut to the two of them, what else, playing a duet on the piano.
"I let the audience use their imaginations," he said. "Can I help it if they misconstrue my suggestions?"
I think more important is a reluctance on Lubitsch's part to judge others—Harvey calls it "moral grace"—that leaves us with the hope that despite all our human failings, love will ultimately win out. In the hands of another director, these stories of pleasure sought and found would curdle into something sour as the characters inevitably faced the consequences of their actions. But in Lubitschland, charm and good manners always prevail. Thus, in a tale such as Trouble In Paradise, thieves can steal and lovers can stray yet all involved can walk away unscathed if they can only conjure the appropriate elegant gesture. This is a fantasy to be sure, but one central to the human experience of longing.
That he could make Americans steeped in Puritan piety believe in the promise of guilt-free pleasure, if only for ninety minutes, is perhaps the most compelling proof of all that Lubitsch did indeed possess the "touch."
[To read Part Three of this essay, click here.]
Next up was supposed to be Part Two of my essay on Ernst Lubitsch, which is well in hand and maybe you'll still get it today if I can squeeze it in before Katie-Bar-The-Door and I head to Nationals Park with Mister Muleboy and Michele Mishka to see Stephen Strasburg.
But it's Jeanette MacDonald's birthday today and since she and Lubitsch are inextricably linked, I just have to stop here and tell her hello.
She was a discovery of Lubitsch's, don't you know. Actor Richard Dix had seen her on the Broadway stage in 1928 and had her make a screen test for Paramount, but nothing came of it until Lubitsch happened upon it a year later and immediately saw her star potential. He flew to Chicago where she was working and signed her to star in his first sound production, The Love Parade with Maurice Chevalier. The picture was a hit, she was a hit and the rest is history.
MacDonald made four movies for Lubitsch, The Love Parade (1929), Monte Carlo (1930), One Hour With You (1932) and The Merry Widow (1934), each better than the last. For those of you who only know her through her later work with Nelson Eddy, I strongly suggest you track down these musicals, and one other, Love Me Tonight, a Rouben Mamoulian musical in the Lubitsch style. She's beautiful and sexy and is allowed to show a naughty side you never get to see again once the studios began to enforce the Production Code in late 1934.
Born in Philadelphia in 1903, MacDonald began acting at the age of six and was winning singing contests by the age of thirteen. After her successful association with Lubitsch at Paramount, Irving Thalberg lured her MGM where she became known as the Iron Butterfly thanks to her skill at negotiating favorable contracts.
She's best remembered now for her association with singer Nelson Eddy. They made eight pictures together, including Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie and Maytime. She also made San Francisco with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, which includes a spectacular recreation of the 1906 earthquake.
A weak heart forced MacDonald into semi-retirement in the 1950s, although she did occasionally perform with Eddy. She died of a heart attack in 1965.
Trivia: MacDonald's sister Blossom, who performed under the name Marie Blake, played Grandmama on the television show The Addams Family.
So since for the 1932-33 awards year I'm using the expanded "Golden Globes" format (splitting up awards for picture, actor and actress between drama and comedy/musical), I'm sure most have you have been wondering who would have won for the previous five years if I'd been doing the Golden Globes thing all along.
Good question, thanks for asking.
It's kind of a mixed bag, as it turns out, which is why I didn't use this format in the first place. For every inspired choice, such as Marion Davies (comedy, Show People) or Edward G. Robinson (drama, Little Caesar), you get somebody like Maurice Chevalier (comedy/musical, The Love Parade) who'd have readers running for the exits. And then you start wondering whether I would really have given Marie Dressler the best supporting actress award of 1929-30 knowing I'd also give her an award for 1930-31. And on and on.
Clearly, I have too much time on my hands.
Anyway, here they are. Make of them what you will. At least Al Jolson dressed for the occasion.
1927-28
Picture (Comedy): The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin)
Actor (Comedy or Musical): Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer)
Actress (Drama): Janet Gaynor (7th Heaven and Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)
1928-29
Picture (Comedy): Steamboat Bill, Jr. (prod. Joseph M. Schenck)
Actor (Drama): Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March)
Actress (Comedy): Marion Davies (Show People)
1929-30
Picture (Comedy or Musical): Hallelujah! (prod. King Vidor)
Actor (Comedy/Musical): Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade)
Actress (Comedy/Musical): Jeanette MacDonald (The Love Parade)
1930-31
Picture (Drama): M (prod. Seymour Hebenzal)
Actor (Drama): Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar)
Actress (Comedy): Marie Dressler (Min and Bill)
1931-32
Picture (Comedy/Musical): À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford)
Actor (Comedy/Musical): Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (The Music Box)
Actress (Drama): Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge)
The Academy did us amateur film historians a real disservice by using their wacky split-year eligibility scheme (August 1 through July 31 of the following year) for the first few years of the Oscars. Not only was it confusing and completely unnecessary, it also disguised just how much the quality of American movies suffered as Hollywood made the transition from the silent era to sound.
Posts
